But, that’s my whole point. There are indeed many ways that the average person can become deficient in some essential nutrient. But, MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT DEFICIENT! And randomly reaching for the multivitamin bottle is not gonna help anything. And if you are deficient, it is probably due to some underlying cause that needs to be addressed.
I will concede that I used hyperbole in my statement about apparent health. You could be sick and not know it. But the odds are so low that the sentiment is valid. It should be “If you have to ask whether or not you are healthy, you PROBABLY are.”
Many people have no trouble understanding topics such as expected value in wagering, or risk benefit analysis in computing insurance rates, but absolutely lose their minds when it comes to vitamins and health.
Randomly supplementing (and by which I mean; without science based evidence particular to you) is a waste of time. But dont take my word for it.
Dude - it’s not you, but nutrition science itself is evolving and many would say that it is still in its infancy. For example, consider the following :
One of the most expensive study - the original Nurses’ Health Study produced mixed results. It even produced contrary results to other studies.
The sugar industry lobbied for a long time that fats are bad and sugar is good. And that gave rise to whole line of low fat foods that actually made you fatter. Scientists played along or were sidelined during this course.
The calories count on packaged food has calories data some of which is more than a century old. And the FDA allows labels to be off by 20%. So when you think you had a 100 calories snack, you could have had 80 or 120. For non packaged food, the calories count is all over the place with no reliable measurement. This kind of measurement error does not exist in most other sciences.
We , as believers in science tend to think that all branches of science are equally mature but it’s certainly not the case with diet and nutrition. Until the science here gets more mature, people will be left wondering, self medicating and the nutrition industry will reel in the profits (sadly so)
That linked study only looked at certain blood parameters commonly used to assess “cardiometabolic” health, and found that some people with elevated body mass index (BMI) have parameters within normal limits. That doesn’t mean they’re “perfectly healthy”, as obese people carry numerous added health risks (the following list is from the CDC):*
People who have obesity, compared to those with a normal or healthy weight, are at increased risk for many serious diseases and health conditions, including the following:
All-causes of death (mortality)
High blood pressure (Hypertension)
High LDL cholesterol, low HDL cholesterol, or high levels of triglycerides (Dyslipidemia)
Type 2 diabetes
Coronary heart disease
Stroke
Gallbladder disease
Osteoarthritis (a breakdown of cartilage and bone within a joint)
Sleep apnea and breathing problems
Some cancers (endometrial, breast, colon, kidney, gallbladder, and liver)
Low quality of life
Mental illness such as clinical depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders
Body pain and difficulty with physical functioning*
It’s true that concepts of nutrition continually evolve - but we can say the same for medicine and science in general. One constant is that we should beware of marketers telling us we need daily doses of vitamins/supplements/antioxidants/“miracle” foods to stay healthy, as opposed to a good balanced diet accompanied by adequate exercise and sleep.
Body Mass Index is junk science. First of all, the basis was performed around 1850, based upon French Peasants, and didn’t even include taller heights.
Next, in 1998, the Diet industry got them to change the BMI so that more people would rate as “obese” or overweight so that they could sell more diet products.
And sure there is sometimes a mild correlation between weight and increased risk (but see below) , but in most cases there isn’t a causation.
BMI is there to sell more diet products (most of which are also junk science, worthless or even dangerous) and to raise Life insurance rates.
It has no scientific usefulness or foundation.
*2. It is scientifically nonsensical.
There is no physiological reason to square a person’s height (Quetelet had to square the height to get a formula that matched the overall data. If you can’t fix the data, rig the formula!). Moreover, it ignores waist size, which is a clear indicator of obesity level.*
There’s just one problem: A higher BMI doesn’t necessarily mean you’re less healthy. In fact, patients with heart disease and metabolic disorders whose BMIs classify them as overweight or mildly obese survive longer than their normal and underweight peers. A 2013 meta-analysis by the National Center for Health Statistics looked at 97 studies covering nearly 3 million people and concluded that those with overweight BMIs were 6 percent less likely to die in a given year than those in the normal range. These results were even more pronounced for middle-aged and elderly people. This is known as the obesity paradox. “The World Health Organization calls BMIs of 25 to 29.9 overweight,” says Paul McAuley, an exercise researcher at Winston-Salem State University. “That is actually what is healthiest for middle-aged Americans.”…In 1998, the National Institutes of Health lowered the overweight threshold from 27.8 to 25—branding roughly 29 million Americans as fat overnight—to match international guidelines. But critics noted that those guidelines were drafted in part by the International Obesity Task Force, whose two principal funders were companies making weight loss drugs. In his recent book Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic, political scientist Eric Oliver reports that the chairman of the NIH committee that made the decision, Columbia University professor of medicine Xavier Pi-Sunyer, was consulting for several diet drug manufacturers and Weight Watchers International.